Short answer. Yes. Where the person exercising parental authority has subjected the child, or allowed the child to be subjected, to sexual abuse, that person shall be permanently deprived by the court of the authority. The provision reaches permitting the abuse as well as committing it, and it is stated as a command.
What the law says
If the person exercising parental authority has subjected the child or allowed him to be subjected to sexual abuse, such person shall be permanently deprived by the court of such authority.
Family Code, Article 232 — Permanent Deprivation for Sexual Abuse. Read the full provision →
The provision, and the two words that carry it
The rule is a single sentence: if the person exercising parental authority has subjected the child or allowed him to be subjected to sexual abuse, such person shall be permanently deprived by the court of such authority. Shall and permanently are both deliberate. The Code does not frame this as a measure a court may consider among others, and it does not place the deprivation among the terminations that Article 229 allows to be revived by a later judgment. It is the most severe consequence the chapter provides.
Allowing it is enough
The clause or allowed him to be subjected is the part families most often overlook. The article reaches the person who did not commit the abuse but permitted it — who knew, or who put the child within reach of it, and did nothing. That is a separate route to the same consequence, and it applies to whoever was exercising parental authority, which can include someone standing in a parent's place rather than the biological parent. The provision is written around the failure to protect, not only around the act.
A court makes the deprivation
The authority is lost by the court, which means a proceeding in which the matter is established rather than an automatic consequence of an accusation. Article 229 also lists, among the grounds terminating authority, a final judgment of a competent court divesting the party concerned of it. What follows for the child is handled by the ordinary provisions: Article 216 gives substitute parental authority in default of parents to the surviving grandparent, the oldest sibling over twenty-one, or the child's actual custodian over twenty-one.
What matters if you are dealing with this now
The child's immediate safety is a separate and more urgent question than the eventual deprivation of authority, and it is not one to handle through a private family arrangement. Report the matter to the authorities, get the child to medical attention, and keep every record made at the time — dates, what was said, who was told, what was done in response. Take that record to a lawyer promptly. Cases of this kind turn on what was documented while it was fresh.
Related provisions
- Family Code, Article 229 — Revivable Termination of Parental Authority
- Family Code, Article 216 — Order of Substitute Parental Authority